A Riverside City College employee on Thursday, Feb. 19, mistakenly sent acceptance letters to 134,000 email addresses when only about 500 students should have received them. School officials said it was an error and not a hack.

On Thursday, Feb. 19, an employee’s error caused a welcome letter to go to 134,000 email addresses, including those of people who last registered for classes 10 years ago, according to district officials and comments on Facebook.

About 400 to 500 students should have received the letter, Riverside Community College District spokesman Robert Schmidt wrote in an email Friday. Officials stressed that the school’s computers were not hacked and no student data was improperly released.

In an unrelated problem Thursday, the phone system went down at the district offices and RCC campus, so people calling to ask why they got an acceptance letter couldn’t get through. Phones also were down Friday afternoon.

The email problem occurred when an employee preparing an email blast to new students improperly set the parameters for who should receive it, Riverside Community College District board President Virginia Blumenthal said Friday. That accidentally created a massive distribution list, she said.

“This is not a data breach, it is not hacking,” Blumenthal said. “There’s no security issues.”

Several Facebook users posted comments Thursday worrying that the school had been hacked or its name was being used in a scam. Others wrote that they’d received the welcome letter but hadn’t attended RCC in years.

The district sent a follow-up email telling recipients that if they hadn’t applied to attend the college in 2015, they should disregard the welcome letter. A notice was posted on the admissions page of RCC’s website.

Blumenthal said the phone system issue, which also began Thursday, is “not an internal problem.” AT&T briefly restored service several times but had not fixed it completely by Friday afternoon, she said.

The college district last reported a human error related to student information in June. In that incident, information for more than 35,000 students – including Social Security numbers, birth dates and some academic records – was sent to the wrong email address by a district employee.

At the time, district officials said the employee used personal email accounts to send and receive the file because it was too big to go through the district’s secure server. They were not aware of any fraudulent use of the misdirected student data.

Alicia Robinson covers Anaheim for The Orange County Register. She previously spent 10 years at The Press-Enterprise writing about Riverside and local government as well as Norco, Corona, homeless issues, Alzheimer's disease, streetcars, butterflies, horses and chickens. She grew up in the Midwest but earned Southern California native status during many hours spent in traffic. Two big questions Alicia tries to answer in stories about government are: how is it supposed to work, and how is it working?